“I’m not
everything I want to be, but I’m more than I was, and I’m still learning”
Charlotte
Eriksson
After the success of Mental Health Awareness
Week (last week), I’m thinking there’s quite a few new readers… So, in case
you’re one of them and you don’t already know, Lauren is one of my best friends
who I’ve known for fifteen years now and on May 18th, 2021, she gave
birth to her beautiful baby boy; Greylan. Within days of his birth, I was
obviously writing a blog post for him (DEAR GREYLAN | MY BEST-FRIEND HAD A
BABY BOY!!! | I'm NOT Disordered (imnotdisordered.co.uk)) and now that it’s his First
Birthday, I was inspired to write this piece about everything related to
growing up and mental health…
MY CHILDHOOD – FROM RABBITS TO
SINGLE-PARENTING
Having been
a psychiatric hospital inpatient a number of times and for lengthy periods of
time, I met a lot of inpatients whose childhood was incredibly sad, difficult,
and traumatic. To be honest, I think that before I heard of such upsetting
childhoods, I had thought that the happiness of mine, was completely normal and
how it was ‘meant’ to be done. It’s meant that in knowing these people, I
became so much more grateful for the fact that in my childhood, I was
surrounded by love, encouragement, support, and kindness.
The largest
notable part of my childhood that has affected my mental health journey, was
when I had two black and white rabbits called Thumper and Happy and they had
babies. We didn’t know that you shouldn’t handle the babies (kits, I think
they’re called) and so the rabbits killed/ate them (something which is actually
a well-founded fact: 6
Main Reasons Why Rabbits Eat Their Babies (Tips to Stop) (atshq.org)). So, professionals deemed this
‘trauma’ to be a direct influence on the fact that my visual hallucinations
from the Transient Psychosis I began to experience when I was eighteen were
rabbits. Horrible, dirty rabbits that left me either speechless and terrified
or screaming and running away!
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